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Re: every day, 10 packages make it through NEW (Re: Seeking new members for the DFSG team (Re: Bits from the DPL))



On Friday, November 14, 2025 8:11:20 AM Mountain Standard Time Sebastiaan 
Couwenberg wrote:
> On 11/14/25 3:01 PM, Sean Whitton wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > On Fri 14 Nov 2025 at 12:40pm +01, Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
> >> On 11/14/25 12:32 PM, Holger Levsen wrote:
> >>> On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 11:08:20AM +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:
> >>>> I'm considering starting a GR to... do what? That I am not sure yet. 
But
> >>>> this
> >>>> is really really bad. >1000 packages made it through NEW in 2025 alone,
> >>>> yet
> >>>> we are where we are.
> >>>> 
> >>>    I was corrected, so far 2913 packages made it through NEW in 2025.
> >>>    That's
> >>> 
> >>> roughly 10 per day.
> >> 
> >> And a single person is responsible for almost all of them.
> >> 
> >> Think of how many packages would pass NEW with more people helping out.
> >> 
> >> Or how few if Thorsten stops working on NEW.
> > 
> > Yes.  That's not a sustainable situation.
> > 
> > "almost all" as in, 99.<multiple nines>, seriously.
> 
> For those who might think this is hyperbole, these are the numbers for 2025:
> 
>   Periods: 10 (2025-01 - 2025-10)
>   Total accepted: 2814
>   ta accepted:    2726 (99.9999999999999999999999999999%)
> 
> This is using the numbers for Thorsten's blog.
> 
> You need to go out of your way to not get the percentage rounded up to 100%.

I do not wish to make anyone feel bad with the following comment.  I simply 
add it because I feel that this is the more important number than the number 
of packages that clear NEW each day.

The number which is think is more important is how long the OLDEST package in 
NEW is.

I recently had a package, feather-wallet, that was added to NEW on 2025-03-17 
and cleared the queue on 2025-11-07, making over seven months.  I have had 
other packages wait in NEW for several months, and currently have the 
following packages in the queue:

ruby-stimulus-rails:  1 month (the new upstream release of redmine is waiting 
on this package to clear NEW)
vkbasalt-cli:  1 month
bitcoin-knots:  1 month
datum-gateway:  1 week
bazaar:  1 week

On the other hand, I have had other packages clear NEW in just a few days.  
So, I don’t always have a long wait.  However, I know that a lot of other 
developers have also been inconvenienced by packages stuck in NEW based on the 
number of conversations that come up from time to time on the mailing lists 
discussing ways to avoid having to go through NEW when considering packaging 
options.

So, when speaking about statistics for the NEW queue, I think the most 
important statistic is how old is the oldest package in the queue (currently 
linux-entra-sso at 1 year) and what we, as a project, consider to be an 
acceptable value for that upper limit.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
soren@debian.org

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